The announcement cast a temporary pall over the concert—the pall lasted for more than twenty minutes, before the music got back to where it’d been—and a half dozen Juggalos wandered over to the cops to show off cell phone photos.

One of them, by a Hayward Juggalo named Betty Morrow, had a snapshot that showed her girlfriend in the foreground, and a license tag in the background, on a car that appeared to be in the Pilate circle.

They couldn’t make out the tag on the phone screen, but a deputy had Morrow e-mail the photo to a friend of his in Hayward, an amateur wildlife photographer, who ran the shot through Lightroom and two minutes later came back with both the license plate number and a make and model on the car, an aging Subaru Forester.

“Here’s the thing. The plate’s not from California,” the deputy said. “I’ll give you one guess where it’s from.”

“I don’t want to guess,” Lucas said. “Where’s it from?”

“Would you believe . . . Minnesota?”

“Goddamnit—they’re from California,” Lucas said. “If it’s a Minnesota guy, he might not be related.”

“He was parked in the circle,” the deputy said.

“Give me the number—I’ll call the office and have them run it,” Lucas said.

Lucas called the BCA duty officer in St. Paul, and said, “Everything you’ve got. E-mail it to me.”

The duty officer could give him one bit immediately: the car was registered to a Chester Tillus, who lived east of Baudette in Lake of the Woods County.

“I’ll get you a driver’s license photo in ten minutes, if he’s got one.”

“Hang on.” Lucas got an e-mail address for the sheriff’s office from the deputy, and passed it on to the duty officer. “Send copies of everything to both me and the sheriff’s office. They’re looking for the guy over here in Wisconsin, could be a murder charge involved.”

“I’ll do that. Are you at the scene?”

“Yeah, but I’m going over to my cabin,” Lucas said. “Right now, it’s a snake hunt, and the cheeseheads got it.”

The deputy said to Lucas, when he rang off, “Nothing I like better than a nice Brie.”

“I believe it,” Lucas said. He called Stern to fill him in, and said, “I can’t think of anything else. I’m gonna get Letty back to my cabin and get some sleep myself.”

“See you in the morning,” Stern said. “I’m catching an early plane out.”

•   •   •

LUCAS DROVE OUT to his cabin, lit it up, offered to put together a cheeseburger, but Letty declined and said, “I’m gonna go sit on the dock for a few minutes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yup.”

When Lucas followed her out, carrying a beer and his iPad, she’d unfolded a second deck chair for him. He sat down and sighed and said, “You do have the ability to piss me off from time to time.”

“I know,” she said. “I don’t think I can be any other way. Or you, either.”

“Probably not,” he said.

“You know how she was killed?”

“We’ll know in the morning, when crime scene gets a look,” Lucas said. “From what you saw, and what I saw, I believe she was probably kicked to death.”

“Ah, jeez.” She was quiet for ten seconds, then said, “I’ve been sitting here, wondering if me meeting her had anything to do with her getting killed. The closest I can get is, if I hadn’t given her my phone number in San Francisco, she might never have found out that Henry was dead. Or she might have stayed in South Dakota looking for him, and she never would have run into Pilate at all. You follow all the bread crumbs through the woods, that’s what comes out.”

“That’s a good way to drive yourself crazy,” Lucas said. “I talked to Bob Shaffer before he went off and got murdered last year. We could have done twenty other things that day and he’d still be alive. I believe there was one second, one tiny moment, that decided whether he’d live or die—if he hadn’t gone into a supermarket for a jelly donut, he’d have lived. He was a pretty good husband and father, and he still would be.”

“Yeah, but if he’d lived, you wouldn’t have been so involved, and maybe Catrin Mattsson would have died.”

“I don’t know. She might have, or maybe Shaffer might have found her sooner,” Lucas said. “Impossible to know. The thing is, you take a fork in the road, it doesn’t always work out for the better . . . but sometimes it does. It must.”

They were quiet for a couple of minutes, then Letty asked, “You get the e-mail yet? From the office?”

“Let me check.” He turned on the iPad to check his mail. The download was slow, with only two bars on phone reception, but in five minutes he had a long file on Chester Tillus. Lucas scanned it and said, “He’s with them. With Pilate.”

He got on his cell and called the sheriff’s office, talked to the duty sergeant and told him the same thing. “You find him, hold him, because he’s part of the bunch. He’s got two burglary convictions and two assault convictions in Minnesota, and a fighting charge in California, and that was only two months ago. He’s been out there, he just didn’t buy the California plates.”

“We’re looking for him,” the deputy said.

•   •   •

AS LUCAS AND LETTY sat talking on the dock, Pilate was on a back highway crossing into Michigan. The rest of the crew had scattered. Skye had been with the cops for a full day before the disciples killed her, and they had no idea what she might have told them. But she knew some names, for sure.

After kicking her to death, they’d gotten scared: Pilate pretended he wasn’t, but he was. All the other murders had been in quiet spots, with nobody around but the disciples. This time, they’d killed a woman next to a large crowd.

Then the dark-haired Juggalo chick had shown up and started yelling at him about Skye. Pilate had punched her: couldn’t help himself, chicks did not get up in his face like that, and walk away.

He was lucky, in a way, that the fat guy had shown up, because he was so buzzed on kicking the first girl to death that he might’ve killed the second one, right there in front of the crowd.

But the fat guy did show up and the Juggalo chick was taken away and they’d hauled ass.

•   •   •

WITH EVERYBODY ELSE going every which way, Pilate headed east in his Firebird, followed by only one other vehicle, the new RV, driven by Terry and Laine. They stuck to back roads but hurried to get across a state line. In Pilate’s experience, which mostly came down to watching Cops on television, the police did not talk well across state lines.

Once in Michigan, at midnight, they found . . . almost nothing. Trees.

“Jesus, it’s dark. Aren’t even any cars,” Kristen said, peering into the darkness through the Firebird’s windshield. “It’s like somebody’s pulled a black sack over your head.”

Dark as the L.A. people had ever seen the world; even the cars’ headlights didn’t seem to punch much of a hole in it. A few miles into Michigan, they saw a narrow dirt track in their headlights, heading off to the left, with a sign and an arrow that said something that they were going too fast to read. They took the turn, and found that it led to a boat landing. They couldn’t see anything of the lake, but there were no lights anywhere. They got flashlights, found a spot where people had camped out, and rolled the two vehicles back into the trees.

“Now what?” Laine asked, when Pilate and Kristen joined Terry and her in the RV.

“Just gonna sit and wait,” Pilate said.

Laine peered out a window. “Bears out there, I bet. Maybe wolves.”

“Wolves don’t eat trucks,” Pilate said. “It is really fuckin’ dark, ain’t it? Lots of stars, though.”

•   •   •

LETTY WAS HURTING when she got up in the morning, at nine o’clock. “Everything hurts. The nose hurts worst. Not the bruise, the place where the doctor cauterized it.”

“Take some pills,” Lucas said.

“I’ve already taken four of them,” Letty said. “The max is two.”